Konstanz, Univ., Magisterarb., 2004.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2002--Mainz.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2003--Dortmund.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Salzburg, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-200) and index.

Despite the difficult situation in Iraq, US President Bush easily won a second term, but his room for manoeuvre is now significantly smaller than it was four years ago. He has at least three conflicts on his plate: the first and most critical one in Iraq, the second the continuing war on terror and the third the struggle to consolidate Afghanistan. Conscious of the growing risk of US overstretch, Bush is now reaching out to the European allies. However, most observers anticipate a change in style rather than any real change in substance.

Thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universität Berlin, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [215-220]).

Zugl.: Berlin, Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2006.

Thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universität Berlin, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [215-220]).

‘Data Imaginary’ is about the co-evolution of the literary and of data around the middle of the long nineteenth century. It argues that, during romanticism, US culture negotiated the outlines of the literary – what literature is, what literary value consists of, and what literature can do – in relation to the outlines of another representational project that was gaining sharper contours and a stronger foothold in public perception at the time: data. As the young nation was searching for a national literature of its own, data and data-driven practices formed an important foil, a conceptual resource to articulate the desire for a new, democratic literature. Revisiting formative decades of US literary self-perception through the conceptual lens of data, this book rethinks the representative project of transcendentalism, the catalog poetry of Walt Whitman, the formal experimentation of abolitionist literature, and the evolution of American (literary) studies.

A large number of recent scholarship in (American) literary and cultural studies is devoted to describing the contemporary moment as a monumental break from the previous (or current) period, postmodernism, by hailing our contemporary times as the era of post-postmodernism, late postmodernism, metamodernism, cosmodernism, or of a similarly termed construction. In these different proclamations, we recognize a pervasive tendency to periodize, an attempt to separate phases of human existence and cultural creation into neat stages that ‘logically’ follow after one another to form a supposedly coherent narrative. This practice of periodizing comes with a number of pitfalls that many of these studies seem not fully aware of, and it in turn speaks to (and characterizes) the contemporary moment as one marked by a desire for the boundedness of such clear divisions. In the following pages, we chronicle the quandaries that follow from such implicit and explicit efforts of periodization by focalizing them through three different ‘creation myths’ of the contemporary that such efforts at periodization typically subscribe to. As a way of sidestepping these, we accentuate the strengths of more ‘local’ critical lenses, approaches that historicize without periodizing. As one such lens, we suggest to engage the contemporary moment through the ‘poetics of politics,’ a historical discursive formation in which literary and popular texts’ desire for political relevance is matched by a recognition, in politics, of the (meta)textual quality of political action.